Being the reviews and ramblings of an incurable narcissist with too much time on his hands.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

DVD Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2

As always, my
watching of the Twilight series is
aided and abetted by Rifftrax. Remember, The Seven love Rifftrax, and so should
you.

Breaking Dawn Part 2
is, without doubt, the most entertaining of the Twilight franchise. Not the best (the horror involved in trying to
determine what one of these is objectively the best would probably drive me
insane, so I’m gonna skip over that question). But despite being an objectively
terrible movie on essentially every conceivable level, Breaking Dawn Part 2 is unquestionably extremely entertaining.
Because of how completely insane the whole thing is, best defined by the moment
where Bella FULL BODY TACKLES A MOUNTAIN LION!

This aspect, more than anything else about the movie, makes
it hilarious to watch. Because of how proudly and devotedly terrible it is,
because of how it blows up all to insane proportions and lets it all hang there
for you to see. The rampant misogyny, the Mary Sue-ism inherent in Bella’s
character, the focus on Bella and Edward over still clichéd, but vastly more
interesting characters, Michael Sheen’s HYSTERICALLY over the top performance, the
horrible direction and special effects, the awful screenplay, all of it is
ramped up to 11. And the result is a teetering train wreck of a movie that is
hilarious to watch.

By now, all of you have heard of the hilarious anti-climax
in the book (in which the bad guys show up, are told their issue is a
misunderstanding and then leave) and how the movie manages to make it worse
(how the movie decides to include a huge action sequences in which multiple
characters are killed, only to reveal that it was all a dream and go with the
anti-climax) but even having heard about it, the shock at the scene and the way
they go about is jaw dropping, because without the copout, the ending would be
legitimately awesome.

So ends the Twilight
saga, not with a bang but with a whimper. And yet, as I look back over the saga
and the way it altered the pop culture landscape, and my own arc of hating it,
to being sick of it, to just being tired of the whole thing, backlash and all,
I can almost say that in a weird, sadistic way I’m going to miss it. It was a
uniting force in a way I’ve never seen in my life. Everyone outside of it’s
fanbase, from highbrow critics to the average movie goer was united in our
various flavors of disdain for the franchise. Not even Nickleback could achieve
that. And even beyond that, Twilight
spilled over into other things. Female targeted genre fiction exploded in a big
way, and while a large portion of it was terrible, it’s slowly gaining ground
into respectability (call me when a Tamora Pierce adaptation gets greenlit).
Even in my own life the Rifftrax of all 5 movies remain some of their best
work, and are largely responsible for me being as into Rifftrax as I am, as
well as my returning to Mystery Science
Theater 3000.

But the long lasting culture impact of Twilight could be an article (or several) on it’s own and would
have to be written by someone much smarter than me. As for Breaking Dawn Part 2…well it is an unmitigated disaster, a complete
failure as a movie. But…if you’re into pointing and laughing and someone’s
pathetic failure to make a working movie...well let’s just say this’ll work. It
is one of the biggest and most hilarious failures to come out of Mainstream
Hollywood in a long while.

Elessar is a 23 year
old Alaskan born cinephile and he wonders why the franchise wasn’t about the
lesbian Brazilian vampires.